“The Yuz and LACMA will be equal partners on the foundation and collaborate on exhibitions and other programming, with a first show set for 2019 at a venue that has not yet been announced. The deal is the first of its kind between museums in the United States and China.” …

Bloomberg’s Tech Reporters Write Another Gullible Story: There’s something going on over at Bloomberg’s tech desk. Last week Bloomberg looked at Verisart, the block-chain based start-up that believes the art market is a den of thieves. This week, we get the dubious claim that nine-year-old, profit-challenged Artsy is going to replace gallery shows with “hosting the online equivalent of openings on its site.” …

“The objects, which included ancient mosaics and sarcophagi, were stolen from archaeological sites in Libya by groups linked to Islamic State, Spanish police said in a statement late on Wednesday. The two suspects, who weren’t identified by name, were being held while a judge decides whether to try them on charges of terrorism financing and other crimes.” …

Lawyer Nicholas O’Donnell Uses van Gogh to Illustrate HEAR Act:Christie’s van Gogh is getting a lot of attention for having been owned by Elizabeth Taylor. But Christie’s also included in the work’s provenance the information that it had once been owned by Margarethe Mautner, a German Jew who bought the painting in the 1920s before she fled to South Africa in 1939 where she died eight years later at the age of 84.

O’Donnell has written about the painting in his book on restitution. Mauthner’s heir, Andrew Orkin, sued Taylor in 2004 “asserting that has Mauthner’s heir, he was the true owner of the painting. His case was dismissed because the court held that California’s statute of limitations had expired. Orkin v. Taylor, 487 F.3d 734 (9th Cir. 2007). Orkin had also argued for the existence of a right to sue under the Holocaust Victims Redress Act of 1998, an argument which courts never adopted. As a result of the dismissal, the parties never litigated the factual question of the validity of the sale, and the court never had to decide against whom the historical uncertainty should be held—Mauthner’s heirs, or Taylor.”

Because of these cases, the van Gogh’s title is settled and neither the buyer nor seller has any concerns. O’Donnell praises Christie’s for including Mautner in the provenance. He also points out that the 2016 Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery (HEAR) Act would have allowed American courts to resolve the case. …

For millions of African-Americans today, the site is “ground zero,” as the Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has put it, for “blackness, black culture, the African experience, the African-American experience, slavery — however you want to slice it.”